Capcom’s dino shooter Exoprimal is campy but clunky

theverge.com:

When I first saw Exoprimal, I groaned because it looked like yet another game in which an interesting premise (fighting dinosaurs!) would be swallowed by the soul-sucking banality of being a third-person live-service multiplayer game in an era that sees such games released for a hot six months before they’re shut down. But word of mouth from friends and colleagues I trust was enough to get me to try it, and from the first handful of moments — none of which had anything to do with dinosaurs — I was all in.

At the very beginning of the game, before you even make your character, there’s a female android who infodumps all the information needed to set the stage. She’s wearing a “Danger! High Voltage” sticker, but it’s not on her chest or forehead or any conspicuous place you’d expect for such an important warning. It’s on her pelvis, right above where a panty line would be. That subtle bit of humor sold me immediately. I love campy games — not games with the quippy, relentless humor of, say, Borderlands or High on Life— but something like a Bayonetta or Devil May Cry. Exoprimal is a game that doesn’t take itself seriously and leans into its own absurdity just enough to be actually funny without beating you over the head with how funny it’s trying to be.

There are lots of little jokes like that that have kept me interested in the story Exoprimal is trying to tell, which, so far, is kinda weird and confusing. There’s a long plot introduction that involves time travel, mysterious industrial accidents, and a rogue AI, the details of which I won’t bother you with. Suffice it to say, Exoprimal’s main gameplay loop is centered on you getting ferried back and forth in time to fight dinosaurs in simulated war games that feel like